When I was 7.5 years old, my anger issues started. No one knew what it was for a while. I don’t even know why this happened. Maybe because “Lucky Number seven” turned out to be totally opposite for me. I don’t know for sure. What I do know is that I was going so crazy that I started to put tape on my lips to avoid shouting for no reason. It was more than anger. The therapist even said it was borderline ADHD. I thought whatever was right was actually wrong and vice versa. I could never pay attention without throwing a tantrum about it and thinking of something else.

After coming to India, we settled down in Nagpur. My parents discovered the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, better known as AIIMS, Nagpur. All of us thought that it wouldn’t hurt much to try. There, we met Dr. Sreelakshmi, who was a major part of my progress. The most wonderful part is that she did it without the use of any single medicine. And since hospitals are meant for medicines this is quite surprising.

There were so many efforts put into this. First, we obviously followed Dr. Sreelakshmi’ s advice. I had to write a journal entry every night. And then I had to stressfully review it with her during our weekly meeting. Those were some of the most difficult meetings I must say. To get my mind off this I got interested in stones and gems. I even purchased some colorful stones from Amazon. It was fun to look and play with them. My parents also convinced me that I should try meditation.

In case you don’t know, a tapping meditation is a meditation where you tap (with your fist or fingers on various parts of the body) as you try to meditate with a single focus. The focus can be on single objective health, anger, homework, or whatever you want to fix. I thought it was a neat hack to meditation – because it proved hard for me to close my eyes to focus even for 10 seconds. Although I could barely feel any difference, my parents kept convincing me that it was working. I didn’t actually agree with them but preferred to keep my opinions to myself.

Then one day I fell very ill. I felt extremely weak. This was one of my worst times ever. There was no official diagnosis but I suspect it was Dengue. After all, a bunch of mosquitoes managed to bite me a few times. I was so weak that I could not bring up a single emotion. My emotions were asleep. Not that I suddenly wanted to be Mr. Calm. I HAD to be calm – forced by my physical condition. With minimal tantrums, I just did what I was told by my parents. For me personally, this sickness was a trigger or turning point.

I was back to my normal self after a week or two. But after that period, suddenly my efforts started to bear fruits. I was a normal kid without the need for tape on his lips. My emotions had pulled anger down to its lowest limits ever. If you’ve seen the Walt Disney film “Inside Out”, you can imagine what happened. So did I win the war against anger? To be sure, I still have my days when I get a bit agitated. But my schedule of tantrums went from twice a day to twice every two weeks. My life had changed – a little bit for people around me, and a lot for me. I say this because I know that I have a fair shot to achieve where I put my mind. So what next you will ask? I am working on my social skills – I will let you know shortly how it works out.

I want to continue my no-anger mode into next year. I have heard that resolutions are hard to keep and we get bored easily in a short while. So instead I am going to attempt a no-anger streak in 2022. You can’t always start off a streak of good things right when you decide to do it. I think it takes some time. So please, stick to your resolutions or any goal the right way – the “maintaining streaks” way. And what if the streak is broken? Simple enough. I will start a new one. Right away.